ABSTRACT
ON ANITA GHAI'S “MOVING TOWARDS A MORE INCLUSIVE FEMINISM:
RE-THINKING DISABILITY”
- Mostly constructions of disability assume that the disabled person in more damaged while those who construct this disabled identity are undamaged. The implicit assumption of course is that society is normal, intect, capable of setting norms
- A just society can evolve only if all the members of the community they inhabit accept each other. This process does not call for a negation of differences, but understands that it is a social judgement that defines a particular difference as 'difference' that counts
- We need the power of modern critical theories of how meanings and bodies get made, not in order to deny meaning and bodies, but in order to live in meanings and bodies that have a chance for the future
- She criticizes the patronizing representation of disabled woman managing to overcome their difficulties as winners – status of performing artists – and suggests that “for full inclusion, each woman within a culture needs to see herself as an unfinished story, comming to terms with the stories of others and making an attempt to explore the ways in which these stories interwine. If it happens, assumption of an abyss of difference won't be needed. Instead the merging of stories would be a good reason for people to, 'represent themselves to each other and to themselves as unfinished autobiographies or narratives' ”
- This points towards a feminism self-critique of its own 'normalcies' framing standards through which disabled woman get excluded.
- She qoutes Synnott view of beautyism as fascist
- She also claims for a bigger space on feminism to disabled-feminists, both as issues and as participants.
- A focus on the arrangements which recognise the intricate relationship between spatiality and the quality of disabled women's lives can only come from feminists, who are vigilant of such inscriptions
- Even though feminists generaly raise the issue of caring, their emphasis is on the ones who care
- She quotes Hilary Graham's statement that, “caring is a shorthand way of talking about what carers feel and do rather than what care receivers feel and do”
- Feminists have always insisted upon autonomy and independence as the guiding principles of any feminist endeavour. While recognising the embeddedness of women's lives in networks of family and society, insistence has been on one's own freedom. Perhaps that is the reason which creaes the desire for physical fitness and competence. However, disabled women are in no position to aspire for their freedom.
- In her book, Nivedita criticizes this imperative of autonomy on its Kantian formulation.
- No one is entirely self sufficient and the construction of disabled women as exclusively recipients of care is not true. Instead of constructing the disabled women as special and burensome dependents, I argue that we in India, have always been an interdependent society.
- She criticises feminism on what it neglects the particular 'trauma' that the mothers of disabled daughters face
- Davar, Morris and Hillyer though in different contexts indicate the necessity of understanding the political context of care giving from the vantage point of a woman.
- Another area of concern is the possibility of disabled women often experiencing subtle abuse being controlled, rather than in control of caring relationships
- Most cases of abuse fear more intimate carers than strangers.
- Disabled woman are exposed to a powerfull panoptican on the Foucauldian understanding of the term
- The gaze now cast over the subject body is that of subject herself. What is demanded of her is that she should police her own body, and report in intricate detail its failure to standards of normlacy
- At the same time capillary process of power reach deeper into the body, multiplying he norms of function/dysfunction
- Another feature of the disabled lives, especially women, is that of encountering the stare
- The stare is an intensified gaze, which constructs the body as deviant and is instrumental in creating an oppressive relationship
- She quotes Anna Marie Smith to compare the stare and its immediate punitive effect eith forms of hegemony
- She quotes Shildrick and Price: “the reiteration of the technologies of power speak to a body that remains always in a state of pre-resolution whose boundaries are never secured. Indeed repetition indicates its own necessary failure to establish any stable body, let alone an ideal one. In the phallocentric order, the female body, whether disabled or not, can never fully answer to the discursive requirements of femininity but remain caught in an endless cycle of body fetichization. In other words, it is a body that aways exceeds control
- Foucault maintained that the disciplinary apparatus of the state, which puts in place the limits of possible conduct by materialising discursive objects through the repetition of regulatory norms, also by virtue of that repetitive process brings into discourse the very conditions for subverting the apparatus itself
- While deconstruction can assist in breaking down the binary oppositions, the task does not end there.
- She proposes to think in bodies as TAB – temporary able bodies, instead of burden disabled people with not-fiting certain normalcies.
- My attempt therefore is to initiate an inclusive discourse that would make universal sisterhood a distinct possibility
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